Panay grid, Iloilo LNG plant eyed amid Visayas power crunch

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

ILOILO City – A separate power grid for Panay and a fast-tracked liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Iloilo are among the proposals now being discussed as lawmakers acknowledge a power supply crisis in the Visayas, officials of MORE Power said.

At a recent press briefing, MORE Power Chief Operating Officer Engr. Ronald Torres and Energy Sourcing Manager Ralph Dorilag explained why Iloilo City has been hit by manual load dropping (MLD).

They said creating sub-grids came up during a congressional hearing. One option is a separate grid for Panay, which they said is “in the pipeline.”

Torres said one congressman criticized the timeline of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), whose transmission projects run to 2030 and 2040. The lawmaker pointed to an imminent problem in the Visayas.

It was also suggested at the hearing that the private sector could build the transmission lines if NGCP cannot. MORE Power said these proposals could become part of amendments to the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA).

“I think doon sa hearing, everybody agreed that we need to put up a baseload plant here in Visayas,” Torres said.

The official added that the development of an LNG plant planned for Iloilo needs to be fast-tracked. A moratorium on coal plants also limits options for new baseload capacity.

“So normally pag nag-put up ka ng base load plant, 2-3 years minimum,” Torres said. A coal plant usually takes three to five years to complete.

MORE Power said lawmakers also recognized that renewable energy sources have low dependable capacity, at about 30 percent compared with baseload plants.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is also drafting a Panay Master Plan. It is meant to lay out plans and a framework for meeting Panay Island’s local development needs, including upcoming power plants.

MORE Power said Iloilo is especially exposed to shortages because it sits at the “tail end” of the Visayas grid. Power flows into the Visayas from Luzon and Mindanao, passes through Cebu, and reaches Negros and Panay last.

The first MLD was on May 13 and was caused by outages at major power plants.

On Sept. 11, three major plants in the Visayas were offline: Therma Visayas Units 1 and 2 and Panay Energy Development Corporation (PEDC) Unit 3. They returned to service around Sept. 15 but went offline again after a few days.

Transmission limits also stop the Visayas from drawing on spare capacity elsewhere. “But because of the constraint ng transmission line, we cannot just import everything from Luzon,” a MORE Power official said. The officials said the link with Mindanao has the same limitation.

Under the Philippine Grid Code, NGCP, as the system operator, can order MLD when supply falls short of demand. This prevents a system collapse and a Visayas-wide blackout.

“(In) MORE Power, we are just receiving the allocation from the NGCP,” Torres said. NGCP sets how many megawatts must be cut in each hour, and MORE Power’s control center decides which feeders lose power.

The highest hourly cuts usually come between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.

When an MLD is ordered, customers in the Interruptible Load Program are called on first to run their own generators, which are usually diesel. Other customers with generators are then asked to use them.

Mission-critical facilities such as hospitals, military installations and government services are cut last.

MORE Power said small cuts of about 10 megawatts (MW) affect only small feeders. The utility tries to spare feeders that were already cut the day before.

Larger cuts of about 35 MW, or around 30 percent of peak demand, mean full rotational brownouts. “Significant na yun na hindi namin siya ma-exempt yung ibang feeder,” Torres said.